Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Monday September 17, 2012 @06:51PM
from the moar-power-...-reduction? dept.

MojoKid writes "Intel's next-generation CPU architecture, codenamed Haswell, puts heavy emphasis on reducing power consumption. Pushing Haswell down to a 10W TDP is an achievement, but hitting these targets requires collaboration. Haswell will offer finer-grained control over areas of logic that were previously either on or off, up to and including specific execution units. These optimizations are impressive, particularly the fact that idle CPU power is approaching tablet levels, but they're only part of the story. Operating system changes matter as well, and Intel has teamed up with Microsoft to ensure that Windows 8 takes advantage of current and future hardware. Haswell's 10W target will allow the chip to squeeze into many of the convertible laptop/tablet form factors on display at IDF, while Bay Trail, the 22nm, out-of-order successor to Clover Trail, arrives in 2013 as well. Not to mention the company's demonstration of the first integrated digital WiFi radio. Folks have been trading blows over whether Intel could compete with ARM's core power consumption. Meanwhile, Santa Clara has been busy designing many other aspects of the full system solution for low power consumption and saving a lot of wattage in the process."
It's mildly amusing that Windows 8 is the first version to gain dynamic ticks, something Linux has had working since around 2007.

Notice how the display is quickly dominating the power consumption? The whole ARM vs. x86 power consumption bit is bunk. Intel has proven it can be competitive with ARM, and even if ARM could magically make a chip that uses zero power, your display isn't going to suck down any less juice based on the instruction set of the processor running your device....

Uh... Fanboi much? Those Tegra 3 benchmarks have been shown to be *extreme* wishful thinking on Nvidia's part, and if you are naive enough to believe that Intel's lowest-power CPU burns 10 watts then I have a bridge to sell you...

[quote]Since Intel cannot or do not want to manufacture CPUs cheaper than ARM licensees plus they still have lousy performance/watt[/quote]

Show me an ARM solution with better performance per watt than a standard Ivy Bridge Xeon server (or even Sandy Bridge)... and yes, I am *waiting* for you to dredge up those idiotic Calxeda "benchmarks" that claim Sandy Bridge runs at maximum TDP while running at a load of 15% and being substantially faster than Calxeda's yet-to-be-released quad-core ARM server running at 100% utilization on all 4 cores... BRING IT ON.

You have confused performance per watt with total power consumption. ARM is very good at the latter, but is by no means the best at the former.

I have... on my Motorola phone running on an ARM CPU using an embedded GPU that happens to be made by the exact same company that makes embedded GPUs for Medfield phones... So please explain to me how the exact same GPU magically uses zero power when it happens to be sitting next to an ARM core vs. an Intel core... your new learning amazes me!

It's mildly amusing that Windows 8 is the first version to gain dynamic ticks, something Linux has had working since around 2007.

Its also mildly amusing that Windows has always trumped Linux in battery life, despite not implementing this power saving feature.

Windows has always trumped Linux in batter life, you claim? That seems rather sweeping, whereas reports from the field seem mixed, with a significant number in fact reporting an advantage for Linux. I think it depends on a number of factors, including how much access Linux devs have to power management specs for a given OEM chipset. And there have been occasional regressions indeed. These get picked up pretty fast these days and usually corrected after a kernel bump or two.

the OP was more likely talking about the low end of the scale as you noticed.

If all portable devices got the battery life of say an e-ink Kindle there wouldn't be a ARM domination at the low end. But as we've seen, you scale up the screen to full color and slightly larger along with more software to run apps then you start seeing how putting large enough batteries on the things has an effect on their "portability" capabilities.

We all know Microsoft has been in the tablet market for well over a decade, almost two, and they've failed constantly because the resulting products were huge, heavy and battery life was not so great. Here we see Microsoft trying it yet again and this time they are tuning the hardware to the OS to try and get something even close to the current ARM platforms while providing x86 compatibility. I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with this time.

As for ARM, how crippled will the OS and its capabilities be to get a comparable usability as existing options( iOS or Android )? There's still alot of secrecy in this area as recently noted by Microsoft's secret SDK. They want you to think it's about extra features for a marketing surprise but come on, when was the last time Microsoft surprised anyone with new useful capabilities? Most likely it's to limit how immature the platform is and possibly how limited it has to be to operate in the realm of existing battery life expectations. We'll know pretty soon though.

To be honest it embarrasses me to want to associate myself with any "side" when it comes to operating systems and hardware. If I try to say why Windows is better at Linux than something (and make my statement completely without any emotional inflection or attachment), I'm gonna get piled on pretty quickly by a lot of hate posts that don't legitimately counter my points (posts that I would appreciate reading, since I don't know everything). If I go to say, Neowin.net, and try to make a comment about how I feel Windows 8 sucks for my workflow or how I like a particular feature in Linux that Windows doesn't have, I'll be piled on pretty quickly there too.

There are a LOT of seasoned, battle-hardened vets of the operating system wars out there on the net who have nothing better to do than fight against those who don't have the same viewpoint as they do. The mere fact that people can't discuss things and see both sides of an issue without getting into an emotional wreck reminds me how fucking annoying and stupid humans really are.

You have confused performance per watt with total power consumption. ARM is very good at the latter, but is by no means the best at the former.

Performance per watt isn't a single number that can be compared to tell the full story. In an envelope desired by small portable devices, ARM has a significant edge in performance per watt over Intel's Atom.

In server market, Intel has an edge, of course, as they have chips specifically designed for those kinds of high-power workloads. ARM is still a few years away from having anything designed for similar use.

>>>Lol, behind Linux? Right. Who gets better battery life? I shouldn't even argue, your desperate desire to "beat" Microsoft seems to be all you cling on to

I will never comprehend people who look at Micrsoft and believe it's a good OS. Maybe they are Xbox fanboys and that love is spilling-over to all the MS? It's a workable OS but certainly not the best. It was hard-to-use when it was invented in the 80s, crashprone in the 90s, buggy in the first decade of 2000s, and even now still has major flaws (mostly with security holes and illogical behaviors that confuse users... like claiming "there's no USB drive" just because the drive went into a low-power energy-saving state).

You'd think after 27 years of development they'd finally eliminate the flaws & make it near-perfect like Apple did with OS X. But no. ALSO: I was merely responding to this part of the/. article: "It's mildly amusing that Windows 8 is the first version to gain dynamic ticks, something Linux has had working since around 2007." I'm not sure how you missed that sentence.